The Ballad of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen

The queen of punk's crowning pose was captured by a New York police crime scene photographer 30 years ago Sunday.

On the morning of Oct. 12, 1978, cops were summoned to look into "trouble" in room 100 at the Chelsea Hotel on W. 23rd St.

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There was trouble, all right. They found the body of Nancy Spungen, dressed in nothing but black underwear, slumped, sitting beneath the sink, beside the toilet.

Her torso and legs were smeared with blood that had leaked from a single stab wound just below her navel. There was more blood in the bed.

Her boyfriend John Ritchie, better known as Sid Vicious during his brief career with the Sex Pistols, was found wandering the halls in a smack stupor.

"I killed her," he muttered to a neighbor, then quickly added, "She must have fallen on the knife."

Police hauled in the whippet-thin bass player for questioning, but his answers were no less contradictory.

He first said he had no idea what might have happened to Spungen.

Then he said he woke up and found that she had been stabbed but was breathing. He went out to score drugs, then returned and tried to wash the blood off her. He noticed blood on his folding knife, so he washed that, too.

Finally, he said, "I stabbed her but I didn't mean to kill her. ... I'm a dirty dog."

He was charged with murder and packed away to the Rikers Island detox ward.

No skill, but looked the part

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Since that day, fans and creative writers have tried to make the Sid and Nancy story into a Harlequin Romance - a punk "Romeo and Juliet."

Reality was more pungent.

John Ritchie was born into a broken family in London in 1957 and raised by his bohemian mother, Anne Beverley, a heroin addict. He was a poor student who obsessed on rock 'n' roll.

He fashioned himself a drummer and thrust himself into London's emerging punk scene, forging friendships with musicians who later formed bands like TheClash and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

By 1976, he was a regular habitué at SEX, Malcolm McLaren's clothing boutique that featured the "Teddy boy" fashions favored by rock 'n' rollers.

McLaren also happened to be the manager of the Sex Pistols, London's iconic punk band.

When the bass player quit, McLaren gave his spot to John Ritchie - not because he could play, but because he looked like a punk rocker, with snarling lip, spiked hair, lean build, Doc Martens and leather trousers.

Inspired by frontman Johnny Rotten, Ritchie took the stage name Sid Vicious - after Rotten's pet hamster, according to legend - and debuted with the Sex Pistols on April 3, 1977. He played so poorly that guitarist Steve Jones often insisted that the sound man turn off the bass amp during shows.

Vicious asked Lemmy Kilmister from the metal band Motorhead for lessons, saying, "I can't play bass."

"I know," Kilmister replied.

A few months after he joined the band, Vicious met Nancy Spungen, a curvy, dyed-blond American.

Spungen, 19, grew up near Philadelphia and spent her childhood sedated for psychiatric problems. A chronic runaway, by age 15 she was a familiar groupie at CBGB in New York - the sort of fan a band could take home.

And many did, including the New York Dolls, Aerosmith, Bad Company and the Heartbreakers.

Still just 17, she took a flat in Chelsea and worked as a prostitute to finance a growing heroin habit. Two years later she tailed the Heartbreakers to London and met Vicious.

Bandmates and friends were astonished by his hookup with the woman known as "Nauseating Nancy."

"When she started up with that incessant whining she was more than the human mind could bear," said Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. Another woman from the Brit punk scene called Spungen "the most unlikable person I've met."

Yet she and Vicious became entwined, sharing everything - including a smack jones.

She tagged along on the Sex Pistols' U.S. tour in 1978. Drugs and Spungen drove the band apart, and it broke up after a San Francisco show. Sid Vicious' career as a punk superstar had lasted nine months.

Vicious and Spungen settled into a heroin-hazed life at the Chelsea. He did a few infamous shows (including a dreadful rendition of "My Way") at Max's Kansas City on Park Ave. South, but their life pivoted around narcotics.

When they weren't high, they were fighting. Both often had black eyes, bruises and cigarette burns from violent S&M frolics in their room.

Vicious practiced self-mutilation - shallow knife cuts to his torso - creating scars that, in his mind, enhanced his punk look when he was shirtless on stage.

The unkindest cut of all

Spungen added to his collection of knives Oct. 11 when she stopped in a Times Square shop and bought him a handsome folding knife with a 5-inch blade and a jaguar carved into the black handle.

They argued late that night, after a procession of friends and drug purveyors had come and gone.

A neighbor heard a woman moan in room 100 about 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 12. Three hours later, police found Spungen dead - killed with the jaguar knife.

Vicious made bail but was rearrested for an unrelated assault. He was released a second time, on Feb. 1, 1979, and went to the Bank St. apartment of a new girlfriend to celebrate.

Nine hours after he was freed, he was dead of a heroin overdose - from potent smack bought by his mother, Anne Beverley, who had traveled to New York to support him as he awaited trial for murder.

Over the years, authors and amateur sleuths have come up with other possible suspects in the slaying - drug dealers, mainly. But police believed they had their man, and they closed the case when Vicious overdosed.

In 1996, Anne Beverley followed her son to the grave - a suicide by heroin overdose, English authorities reckoned.